UI arborist and family reflect on Iowa City tornado 20 years later

University of Iowa urban forestry supervisor and campus arborist, Andy Dahl, and his spouse, Brandy Dahl, were in the delivery room awaiting the birth of their daughter when the tornado struck Iowa City.

Lance Peterson, News Reporter

April 16, 2026

Ben Roberts/The Daily Iowan Debris lays strewn about Iowa Avenue on Friday morning, Apr. 14, 2006. Although most homes will be repaired, many are damaged to the point of no return.

In eastern Iowa, three supercells, a type of thunderstorm with a persistent rotating updraft and a key factor in the creation of a tornado, formed across eastern Iowa and created 15 tornadoes 20 years ago on April 13. One of those tornadoes touched down in Iowa City.

That night, while in the delivery room at Iowa City’s Mercy Hospital, now the University of Iowa Health Care Medical Center Downtown, waiting for the birth of their daughter, Brandy Dahl and Andy Dahl, the urban forestry supervisor at the University of Iowa, were told about a tornado that had touched down in their area of Iowa City, and they were in its path.

“During the tornado, the lights went off, and the sirens are going,” Andy Dahl said. “I asked the doctor if they did this for all the children, and they said, ‘No, there’s a tornado.’”

Andy Dahl’s wife, Brandy Dahl, said she remembers looking at him and rolling her eyes at him for joking around in the delivery room with a tornado in the area.

Brandy Dahl said neither of them had an idea that a storm, let alone a tornado, was on the horizon that evening.

“We arrived there that morning, and the weather was unremarkable that morning,” Brandy Dahl said.

Despite there being a tornado in the area, Andy Dahl said the doctors told him and Brandy that they couldn’t stop the delivery of their daughter, Amelia, and they carried on.

Brandy Dahl said she wasn’t focused on the tornado, but instead on Amelia’s delivery.

“It was kind of a traumatic delivery, so I wasn’t paying too much attention to the weather,” Brandy Dahl said. “I was super hyper focused on having the baby.”

Brandy Dahl said the family reflects on the day every year, and they even saved a paper from the day it happened to remind their daughter of the events that transpired during her birth.

“We always told her that she came in with a bang that day,” Brandy Dahl said.

The tornado did hit Iowa City like a “bang” that day.

According to reporting from The Daily Iowan, following the storm, the tornado destroyed 26 homes and caused major or minor damage to 260 homes. Local businesses were also affected, with 32 businesses reporting major or minor damage. The power also went out for countless residents as 6,500 people reportedly lost power on April 13, 2006.

Our Iowa Heritage, an online blog that preserves Iowa history, reported that the damage left by the tornado cost Iowa City an estimated $15 million.

Following the events of the tornado, Andy Dahl, who was an arborist for the university at the time before being promoted to an additional supervisory position, said the landscape services department spent a few weeks cleaning up debris from trees that were knocked down by the tornado.

“We had about 75 trees that were lost completely after the tornado,” Andy Dahl said. “It was all hands on deck to clean them up.”

Andy Dahl said he missed the first two weeks of the cleanup process because he was on paternity leave with his newly born daughter.

He said he and the other members of the landscape services department replaced the trees in a process lasting through spring 2007.

Andy Dahl said the majority of the trees affected were ash trees, which are fed on by emerald ash borers, a type of beetle native to East Asia that feasts on the bark of ash trees and can kill a tree within two years of infestation. According to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, the emerald ash borer was discovered in Iowa in 2010 across the Mississippi River.

“Basically every mature tree there went down,” Andy Dahl said. “They were mostly ash trees, green ash, so in a weird way, it kind of did us a favor by getting rid of them before the emerald ash borer would come.”

Two decades later, Amelia Dahl, now a student at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, said she has known about the story of her birth for as long as she can remember and is still awestruck by what her mother was going through.

“I was just amazed that my parents were doing that,” Amelia Dahl said. “A tornado was happening, and I was being born. I thought that was insane.”

For her 20th birthday and the 20th anniversary of the tornado, Amelia Dahl reflected and said she is grateful for how everything turned out for her and her family.

“It was a very destructive tornado, but somehow, I managed to be OK and so did my family, and that is a very good thing,” Amelia Dahl said.